The FWSA Book Prize is intended to recognise scholarship which is innovative, interdisciplinary and grounded in feminist theory and practice. Sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan since its second year, the fourth round of this highly successful competition is open to scholars who were employed, postgraduate students at, or associated with a British or Irish University or research organisation between 1^st January 2009 and 31^st December 2011. Nominated books must be monographs or textbooks and published in English. We welcome single or jointly authored contributions. Edited collections and reprints of earlier editions are not eligible. Books must be first published between 1^stJanuary 2011 and 31^st December 2011; they do not have to have a UK publisher.

The deadline for the current competition is 29th February 2012.

Books may be nominated by authors or publishers, or you can nominate a book that inspired you. All entries will be judged by an external interdisciplinary panel of feminist, gender and women’s studies scholars. The winner and shortlisted entries will be featured on the FWSA website and in the FWSA newsletter. The winner will also be awarded a prize of £500.

For full details about the FWSA Book Prize 2012, including how to enter, please visitwww.fwsa.org.uk or email administrator@fwsa.org.uk.  

Women in Magazines:

Research, Representation, Production and Consumption

In November 2011, Woman’s Weekly celebrated its 100 year birthday by including a reproduction of the first issue inside the centenary edition.  A month later, US Vogue launched a digital archive containing every page published since 1892. These events remind us of the rich history which lies behind  titles that continue to grace the shelves marked ‘women’s magazines’ on both sides of the Atlantic.  Academics, especially feminist scholars, have long explored this history and the relationship between women and the journals that target them, but in recent years this interest appears to have declined. ‘Women in Magazines’ seeks to reassert the importance of magazines, in Britain and America, as a significant source for women’s and gender historians, by showcasing their latest research.

The conference is broad in scope, reflecting the interests of its supporting organisations:  the Centre for the Historical Record (Kingston University), the Centre for American, Transatlantic and Caribbean History (Brunel University), the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW), the Women’s History Network and The Women’s Library.  It will offer a platform for examining the role of women as producers, subjects and consumers of magazines; it will also explore magazines as important historical records which are being made more accessible by digital technology.  The remit is neither bound by time period nor genre: women’s relationships with specialist journals, trade magazines and non-gender specific lifestyle publications such as Ebony are of equal interest to traditional ‘women’s magazines’. The aim is to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue alongside discussion between scholars and representatives of the contemporary magazine industry. An edited collection based on papers presented is planned.

The conference will be hosted by Kingston University, London, on 22-23 June 2012. Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to womeninmagazines@gmail.com by 9 March.  Key themes for the event are consumption, lifecycles and age, race and ethnicity, social class, geography and location. Suggested topics could include, but are not limited to:

Advertising and marketing                                         Advice and education

Archives and digitization                                             Beauty and fashion

Celebrity culture                                                              Editors and journalists

Entertainment and gossip                                           Gender ideology

Methodology and literature                                         Notions of public and private

Politics and citizenship                                                Readers, reading and reception studies

Relationships and the family                                      The home

The magazine industry                                                  Work and careers

As well as thematic papers, we encourage reflections upon how we use magazines as a historic record.  We also encourage papers that look at the 19th century or earlier and particularly welcome submissions that are transnational or comparative in scope.

http://womeninmagazines.tumblr.com/

Thursday, 8 December 2011

in the  Chancellor’s Hall, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1

To obtain further information and register for the conference, contact Jane Lewin (tel:  020 7862 8966; jane.lewin@sas.ac.uk ). Please note the closing date for receipt of registrations is Wednesday, 30 November 2011.

Conference Fees

£25.00
£20.00 Reduced Rate
£15.00 Student Rate

Reduced Rate: Fully paid-up Friends of Germanic Studies or paying members of the IGRS only
Student Rate: Students with proof of status only

More details can be found here:

http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences-workshops/making-sense-symposium-for-naomi-segal.html

The deadline for the current competition is 31^st January 2012.

Books may be nominated by authors or publishers, or you can nominate a book that inspired you. All entries will be judged by an external interdisciplinary panel of feminist, gender and women’s studies scholars. The winner and shortlisted entries will be featured on the FWSA website and in the FWSA newsletter. The winner will also be awarded a prize of £500.

Nomination forms can be downloaded by clicking here.

Please email administrator@fwsa.org.uk with any queries.

Please see this article written by an FWSA member on the LSE anti-discrimination case – Jonathan has also generously offered to donate his fee to the FWSA. Thanks Jonathan!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/07/gender-studies-anti-discrimination-case

We were asked to respond to this consultation as an Association which has been involved in nominating people to the panels. Our response is below – many thanks to all the members who were involved in drafting it. Individuals are also able to respond – so if you feel strongly about this issue please visit http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/pubs/2011/03_11/consult/ to submit your comments.

The Feminist and Women’s Studies Association welcomes the attempts made in the REF 2014 draft criteria and working methods to support staff whose ability to produce outputs has been negatively affected by their circumstances. However, we believe that the provisions made for pregnancy and maternity leave are woefully inadequate. The proposal under ‘clearly defined circumstances’ specifies that the number of outputs submitted can only be reduced once 14 months of maternity leave has been taken. This does not go anywhere towards compensating for the impact of any period of maternity leave and subsequent return to work on an employee’s productivity. The alternative, to submit women who have taken maternity leave as having ‘complex circumstances’ which might justify a reduction in outputs (although this is not guaranteed), leaves too much discretion to individual institutions which may be tempted not to follow this route in order to avoid extra bureaucracy and potential problems.

Since maternity leave is awarded for a maximum of 12 months, the current proposal will only benefit women who bear two children during a REF cycle and who take more than seven months’ leave for each child. Aside from the fact that a reduction in one output is insufficient to compensate a female academic who has had two children within a short space of time (and the upper limit of 27.99 months for the reduction of just one output could even include women who had borne three), it would be patently ridiculous to expect women of childbearing age to organise their fertility in such a way that children were born within the same REF cycle. Many women who bear more than one child will take leaves within different REF cycles, and will therefore suffer a double disadvantage.

The average maternity leave is between six and nine months, which would not qualify a female academic to submit fewer outputs to the REF but which nevertheless constitutes a significant reduction in productivity, particularly taking into account the period of readjustment to returning to work and potential commitments to extended breastfeeding and/or revised working arrangements. We believe that the current proposal would push women to take shorter maternity leaves or to work during their leaves, which would be detrimental to their families and contravene their maternity rights. Alternatively, these women would effectively be expected to be more productive than their colleagues when not on leave, which constitutes a clear equalities issue.

We support the alternative proposal to reduce the number of outputs by one for each discrete period of maternity leave taken during the REF cycle. This is similar to the approach taken by the European Research Council in their Starting Grants criteria, where each child born reduces the amount of time deemed to have elapsed since the applicant’s PhD by 18 months, regardless of the actual amount of leave taken. This recognises in a much more realistic way the potential impact of becoming a mother on an academic career. We realise that this does not fully address differences between women in terms of how much leave they choose to take, and does not adequately support academic fathers: however, we believe it is far preferable to the current proposal. It is imperative for the 2014 REF to operate with an adequate model for dealing with maternity leave and motherhood, to fulfil its own commitments to equality and also to ensure that academia continues to recruit and retain the best available female talent.

http://www.thefreshoutlook.com/index.php?action=newspaper&subaction=article&toDo=show&postID=5629

Stuart Basten’s article:

http://www.thefreshoutlook.com/index.php?action=newspaper&subaction=article&toDo=show&postID=5644

It gives me great pleasure to announce this year’s essay competition results. This year’s winning essay is:

Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg ”Tension in Intersectional Agency. A theoretical discussion of the interior conflict of white, feminist activists’ intersectional location”

The shortlisted essays which together with the winning essay will be published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies are:

Emilia Aaltonen ”‘Punching Like a Girl’: Embodied Violence and Resistance in the Context of Women’s Self-defense”

Jeanne Firth ”Health Choices and Heavy Burdens: Race, Citizenship and Gender in the ‘Obesity Epidemic’”

Aristea Fotopoulou ”Intersectionality and Queer Studies as methodological frameworks for social research”

Maria do Mar Pereira ”Gender Studies is Proper Knowledge, But…: Discourses of Dismissive Recognition of Feminist Scholarship”

Naomi Griffin ”Gendered performance and performing gender in the DIY punk and hardcore music scene”

Congratulations to all winners, and to everyone who contributed to making this round such a success! The judges agreed that the quality of essays received was strong, as always, though with a few more from the Social Sciences.

The FWSA Newsletter is a biannual publication with a readership of nearly 300 national and international subscribers from a wide range of disciplines and interest areas related to women, gender and feminism. In addition, the newsletter is distributed at a variety of conferences and locations relevant to FWSA’s remit. The newsletter is published in January and July.

Submission Requirements

Submissions can be made throughout the year, but must fulfil the following requirements. If you have any questions about the scheme, please email administrator@fwsa.org.uk.

Click here for guidelines.

1.      Work submitted must be accompanied by the entry form. Click here to download the form.

2.      Images must be the original work of the artist(s) submitting the entry.

3.      Image must not have been published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

4.      Any one artist or team of collaborating artists may submit no more than two images in any one calendar year.

5.      Images must be suitable (in size and quality) for publication on an A4 cover page.

6.      Submissions must be made in electronic format as a pdf file.

7.      Artist(s) submitting images must be available and agree to provide information on themselves and their work for a feature in the FWSA newsletter if their work is accepted.

8.      Images must be inspired by or relatable to the topics of feminist, women’s and/or gender studies. We suggest artists who are considering a submission request a free electronic copy of a previous newsletter from the FWSA administrator (administrator@fwsa.org.uk) in order to get a better idea of the FWSA’s remit and the newsletter’s focus.

9.      Acceptance and rejection of images is entirely at the digression of the FWSA Newsletter editor.

10.  Images accepted will be used for the next possible issue (be this the next or a later one).

11.  The FWSA reserves the right to distribute newsletter issues for publicity purposes as its committee members see fit.

We welcome papers on any aspect of women’s and gender history in North America, South America and the Caribbean.  Papers that investigate women’s lives from single or multiple vantage points whether topically or geographically are equally welcome.  Scholars working on related topics are encouraged to put together a panel of two to four papers.  Speakers at the event will have the opportunity to submit their paper for consideration in the BHWAs’ journal, History of Women in the Americas.

The event has two keynote speakers: Professor Steven Reschly, Truman State University, who will be speaking about his research on Amish women and consumer culture, and Professor Catherine Clinton, Queen’s University Belfast (tbc).

A 300 word abstract should be submitted to Jay Kleinberg (jay.kleinberg@brunel.ac.uk) and Rachel Ritchie (rachel.ritchie@brunel.ac.uk) by Friday 6th May 2011.  All other enquiries about the conference, the BHWAs and History of Women in the Americas, should be directed to Rachel Ritchie (rachel.ritchie@brunel.ac.uk).
Those interested in attending the conference as a delegate are also more than welcome.  Please register your interest by Friday 6th May 2011.